


'odbin Takes the Case

by drayton



Category: Oxford Time Travel Universe - Connie Willis
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-14
Updated: 2015-05-14
Packaged: 2018-03-30 11:43:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,331
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3935548
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/drayton/pseuds/drayton
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Binnie puzzles out Eileen's secret.  Set during <em>All Clear</em>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	'odbin Takes the Case

No matter what my schoolmistress says, I'm good at learning things, at finding things out. So's Alf. We've 'ad to be.

 _Had._ I try to talk posh now, like Eileen. Eileen sounded Irish when we were in Backbury, but not anymore. I used to think she was pretending to be posh, like a cinema star. Now I know she was pretending to be Irish.

When Alf was still a baby, I learned that asking Mum too many questions was a good way to get a smack. Mum wasn't around much, at least not when she was awake. Mum used to leave us with Granny Brown, two floors up, but she wasn't really our gran and didn't like questions, either, so Alf and I had to learn things on our own.

From listening, we learned that Mum was on the game, and I eventually found out what “on the game” meant, although I didn't tell Alf until after Mum died. He knew she got money from men, but thought Mum was telling them stories or dancing with them or somefink. Which I suppose she was, in a way.

 _Something._ I forget to be posh sometimes, when I'm tired or upset.

After Granny Brown died, Mum left us on our own, and we learned how to steal food and dodge truant officers and tell sad stories to get money from people. I tried to learn to cook but I was rubbish at it, except for beans on toast. Any noddlehead can make beans on toast, even Alf.

We found out all sorts of things in Backbury: the best way to paint cows, why apples need to get ripe before you eat them, and how many things in posh houses are breakable. We found out that Eileen went to the woods on her day off, but never saw her meet anyone, although we thought she must be seeing a man. Twice, I saw a shimmer of light just ahead when we were following Eileen, but when we caught up, no one was there, not even Eileen. It made me think of witches, who can do all sorts of magical things, but witches in stories are mean old hags who hate children and it was Eileen, not Mrs. Bascombe, who'd vanished in the woods.

After we left Backbury, we had the hardest learning of all. Mum didn't come back one morning, or the next, or the next, and then we 'eard she was dead. We didn't need her to look after us, but we didn't have money for the rent and things got bad when our ration books ran out. We weren't stealing food for fun because we were a little 'ungry; we were proper starving and didn't have warm clothes. To be honest, it was a scary way to live, but orphanages ain't much more than prisons for children, so we went on roaming the Underground for whatever we could scavenge, dodging station guards and slipping away from anyone who eyed us too closely.

The night of the big fire, the twenty-ninth, I found out that Mr. Goode was maybe an angel. Leastways, he'd been a good driving instructor and he'd given Alf the map that taught us the London streets well enough to find our way through a maze of burning buildings. We wouldn't have lived through that night without him. I also learned that I'd missed Eileen something fierce, but being with Granny Brown and Mum had taught me that when someone leaves your life, they don't come back.

And then Eileen found us out and we learned something else: what it was like to always have clothes and shoes that fit, and a warm place to sleep, and 'ot water. After we got thrown out of the boardinghouse, we had good things to eat, too. Well, as good as Polly and Eileen could make it, with a war on.

I learned what it felt like not to be afraid all the time.

And then Mr. Hobbe came, and I was frightened again, and didn't know why. He was only a sick old man, but Eileen and Polly knew him, and I didn't like that. They said he'd been their teacher, and he felt like a schoolmaster, but I wondered if he'd come from the shimmering place.

Alf didn't trust him, either, so we stayed well away. Mr. Hobbe didn't seem very interested in us, and looked half-dead, anyway, so it was easy enough.

Then he got better, and slowly looked less haunted, as if he'd decided to live. One day, he crept up behind me while I was trying to do my wretched lessons. One of the things I'd learned about living with Eileen was that she got cross whenever we skived off from school. It seemed an odd thing to fuss over, but Eileen had been good to us, so I went to school and actually stayed there, mostly, even though I hated my schoolmistress, Miss Needham.

That day, Miss Needham had given me lines, saying they'd improve my handwriting if not my behavior, and I was wrestling with my fountain pen. I hated pens, and was making a mess of things as usual and wondering whether she'd make me do them all over again, when a quiet voice said, “There's an easier way to hold your pen. Let me show you.”

Before I could say anything, he gently shifted the pen in my hand, and placing his hand over mine, traced a few letters. “If you put your fingers here, and angle the pen just so, you'll get less ink on your fingers, and your hand won't be so tired.”

Startled, I did as he said, and he was right: things were much less of a struggle. Why hadn't Miss Needham shown me, the old cow? I looked up at him. “Is this what you used to teach Eileen and Polly?”

He smiled sadly. “No. I taught them History, at university. This is merely a skill I've found useful for my work.”

Eileen came home just then with the shopping, so I didn't get to ask him anything else, although my brain was burning with questions. Eileen had been to _university_? Her family must have been well off. What had happened to them, and how had she ended up a servant?

 

I talked it over with Alf, and we agreed that asking Eileen straight out about herself was a dead loss. We'd known her for ages, and she'd never told us a thing.

“We'll 'ave to be detectives,” he said. “Like in Eileen's books.”

“You're going to be Miss Marple?” I said scornfully. “Right, then, I'll help you steal some granny's dress off the wash-line and we'll put chalk in your hair.”

“You will not!” he said angrily, and we started fighting and Eileen heard us, so that was the end of our planning.

 

I thought, though, that maybe Mr. Hobbe would let something else slip, if we were patient, so maybe Alf had been right. We were patient, but Mr. Hobbe was clever, which we should have expected, since he'd taught at university, and most of the time he smiled politely and ignored our questions. He was good, though, about helping me with my lessons without acting like I was a complete noddlehead for not knowing things other children my age did, which put him miles ahead of Miss Needham in my book.

Still, Alf and I heard bits of things when the adults thought we were asleep or in the next room. Our thieving days had taught us a thing or two about not being noticed, so we heard things and tried to piece them together later, just like we tried to make sense of things we'd overheard when Eileen and Polly and Mike used to talk on the emergency staircase in the Underground.

The word “time” cropped up a lot in ways I didn't understand, and there was talk of history and "the continuing", which made no sense. And there were names: Colin was one I heard nearly every day, but they also talked about Churchill and Hitler and Napoleon, and I didn't understand that at all. It made sense to talk about Mr. Churchill and Hitler, with the war on, but even Alf knew that Napoleon had been dead for ages. Was Colin dead, too?

I wouldn't have asked, but Alf will say anything, and got us our next big clue. One day, when Mr. Hobbe was going over Alf's sums with him, Alf, who hates lessons and ducks them any way he can, said, “ 'ow come you ain't got no children, then, to torture with lessons?”

Polly snorted, but Mr. Hobbe gravely said, “I never married, so I have no children of my own.”

I was about to point out that marrying's got nothing to do with fathering children, when Eileen said, “What about Colin? He's as much yours as Alf and Binnie are mine.”

"And Kivrin," Polly added, "even if she wasn't a child when you met her."

“Why ain't he with 'em, then?” Alf demanded.

Eileen got that look on her face that meant she didn't want to answer questions, and I half-expected us to be bundled off to do some chore, but Mr. Hobbe intervened.

“Kivrin is a grown woman,” he said, “and Colin's almost grown, and away at school, so I don't need to be there all the time.”

“Wot school?” Alf said, and Mr. Hobbe told him something, but I was thinking so hard I missed it. I'd just discovered something very important. Two things, actually. Colin was Mr. Hobbe's son, or as good as. And Eileen thought we were hers.

We belonged to somebody, and not in a bad way.

 

Me and Alf went on eavesdropping whenever we could manage it without being caught. From the bits we picked up, the adults seemed less worried than they'd been when Mr. Hobbe first came home with Polly, although something still wasn't right. As spring came, Eileen was happy enough but Polly and Mr. Hobbe exchanged glances sometimes that gave me the feeling something bad was coming. They didn't seem afraid of it anymore; just a little sad and determined to see things through, the way Mr. Goode had been when he said goodbye to go back to the front.

More than once, we'd heard Polly or Eileen say, “Mr. D—” and then stop themselves when they were talking to Mr. Hobbe, so we knew that Hobbe wasn't really his name. Was he a spy? If he was, did that mean Eileen and Polly were spies, too? Neither of us wanted to believe they were Nazi spies, but if they weren't, why all the secrets?

 

I was learning sword-fighting and how to be a bramblebush and that painting scenery isn't like painting cows when Colin arrived. From what Mr. Hobbe had said, I'd expected him to be a boy, but he was a man, very tall and not bad-looking, although not nearly so handsome as Ronald Coleman, so I don't know why Polly looked so goopy about him. He told us he was an RAF pilot, and that made no sense because he was supposed to still be at school. Colin was younger than Mr. Goode but much older than any schoolboy.

And then all the clues fell into place and it near took my breath away. Time. The shimmering place was a door into _time_ , and Mr. Hobbe and Polly and Eileen were historians who used the door to watch history happening instead of just reading about it in books. And Colin, who'd grown up, had come to fetch them home.

I felt shivery with excitement and miserable at the same time. We'd had it soft with Eileen, and Colin was going to take her away. Maybe we could stay on in the house for a while, or find an abandoned house to stay in, but what about food and clothing and school? I was surprised to find myself sad at the thought of no more school, but stealing takes up a lot of time and school would have to go, unless Eileen could visit now and then to give us money and get our ration books. I was too young to go on the game: that was cruel hard for children, and the few I'd known who tried it didn't last for long. I couldn't look after Alf if I was dead or in the nick, so careful stealing it would have to be.

Perhaps I could write Mr. Goode and he might help us out, although I was afraid any help would lead straight to an orphanage or a place hosting evacuees that had people worse than Mrs. Bascombe. No; we'd be better making do on our own. I'd still write and let him know that Eileen had gone away and was safe, but Alf and I would need to find some other place before 'e got the letter. We couldn't risk him turning up again on emergency leave.

The first thing I'd learned after “don't ask questions” was “don't whinge,” but I still found myself reminding Eileen than she'd once promised not to leave me. _Dunderhead_ , I thought, _she's leaving, and nothing you can say will change that_.

But then Eileen surprised me by saying that she was staying, and even swearing to it, so I learned something else: maybe belonging to Eileen wasn't for keeps, but Alf and me was more important to her than going back to her home in the future, at least for now.

I've never been important to someone else before, except maybe Alf.

So the next time Miss Needham wrinkles her nose like she smells something bad while saying that Binnie's not a proper name for a young lady, instead of suggesting she call me Veronica or Rapunzel or Vivien, I'm going to tell her my name is Eileen.

And p'rhaps I'll ask Eileen if we can call her Mum. 


End file.
